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Śaiva Rites of Expiation. A First Edition and Translation of Trilocanaśiva’s Twelfth-Century Prāyaścittasamuccaya (With a Transcription of Hṛdayaśiva’s Prāyaścittasamuccaya)

Author:

Critically edited & translated by R. Sathyanarayanan with an introduction by Dominic Goodall

Publisher:

Institut Français de Pondichéry / Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient

Year:2015

Pages:

651 p.

Series:

Collection Indologie n˚ 127

Language:

Sanskrit, English

ISBN:

978-81-8470-203-3 (IFP) / 978-2-85539-218-9 (EFEO)

Price:

1200 Rs (52 €)

Remarks:---

About the book

Rites of expiation and reparation (prāyaścitta) may not seem central to the history of the Mantramārga, but they provide a fascinating angle from which to view the evolution of this broad religious tradition. Instead of focussing on the evolution and philosophical defence of Śaiva doctrines, or on the examination of ritual practices and of theories developed to justify and shore up such practices, this study puts the spotlight instead on social dimensions of the religion.

This book contains a first edition and translation of a South Indian compendium of Śaiva expiation rituals compiled by Trilocanaśiva, a twelfth-century theologian celebrated for his Siddhāntasārāvalī, a metrical treatise on the Śaivasiddhānta that is still traditionally studied in the Tamil-speaking South today. Trilocana does not reveal the sources from which he quotes, many of which are lost to us, but an earlier Northern treatise on the same theme from Malwa by a certain Hṛdayaśiva consists only in large labeled quotations, typically whole chapters, from those sources. A Nepalese palm-leaf manuscript kept in Cambridge that is dated to 1157 ad may be the earliest surviving codex to transmit Hṛdayaśiva’s text and we have included a complete transcription of that manuscript as an appendix. A combined quarter-verse-index helps readers to navigate both Trilocana’s and Hṛdayaśiva’s works.

Our introduction attempts to trace the social developments within the Śaivasiddhānta that give context to the evolution of Śaiva reparatory rites.

Following studies at the Madras Sanskrit College and the University of Madras, R. Sathyanarayanan joined the Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO in 1991 to work on epigraphy. He obtained his doctorate from Pondicherry University in 2003 for his study of the Ānandaraṅgacampū (a romance in prose and verse about the eighteenth-century political diarist Ānandaraṅga Piḷḷai) and has since been working on Śaiva literature, notably as co-editor of two other twelfth-century Southern works: the Pañcāvaraṇastava (Pondicherry 2005) and the Dhyānaratnāvali (Karaikkal 2014).

After studies in Oxford and in Hamburg, Dominic Goodall passed several years working in Pondicherry, where he was head of the Pondicherry Centre of the École française d’Extrême-Orient from 2002 to 2011. He has published critical editions of Śaiva works and of classical Sanskrit poetry (most recently, with Csaba Dezső, the eighth-century Kuṭṭanīmata of Dāmodaragupta). He is currently based in Paris, where he gives lectures on Indian and Cambodian Sanskrit literature at the École pratique des hautes études (religious science section).